CARL RITTER'S GEOGRAPHY IN THE WESTERN THOUGHT TRADITION

Abstract

Ritter, who is the founder of modern geography, has been the subject of a great number of research in the west and his studies and his contributions to the discipline have been discussed for many years. However, the number of studies related to Ritter in Turkey is quite low. Because Ritter's works which do not translate into geography have not been translated into Turkish, their studies have not been studied in detail in Turkish geography. The aim of this work is to establish the geographical point of view of Carl Ritter, one of the founders of modern geographical thought, which is regarded as an advocate of empiricism in geographical discipline. The study was carried out with the perspective of humanistic geographical method described by Tuan and the literature review method was used. Scientific papers, books, journals and articles were discussed as data sources. The results of the study showed that Ritter has a regular and harmonious vision of the universe. For this reason, geographical thinking has its theological roots. According to him, the emergence of the harmony between man and nature has come about through God's plan. Ritter has used the inductive method as a framework for presenting data on geography. In this way, I felt the need for a simple empirical generalization. According to God's plan, Ritter claimed that all phenomena were spatially distributed for humanity. In Ritter's theological geography, the whole universe is a thought of God. According to Ritter, the real problem is that the teleological philosophy can not be empirically tested and therefore is not described as a scientific explanation. However, it has a paradigm feature. According to Ritter, geography is an important discipline that deals with human-nature relations. According to him, geography does not just tell the location of places, rivers and mountains. Ritter has developed the concept of "diversity unity" in the region. He was also the founder of the comparative method in the regional geography. It is one of the most important features that differentiates him from his contemporaries that he attaches more importance to human rather than landscape.